The best way to give your audience content they will love is by batching content – creating a bunch of content at once to make your life easier! Creating content every week for your account or website can feel really daunting. Sure, it feels good to have up-to-date content for your followers or prospective clients to see, but it can be really overwhelming to realize you need to carve out time to do it… Every. Single. Week.
When you are trying to juggle all the things in your business, planning out your content can be hard! Keep reading this blog post to learn how batch content creation can make your life so much easier.
What is Batch Content Creation
Don’t feel intimidated by the idea of content batching. It’s actually one of the easiest ways to simplify your life and your business! Later.com says “It helps you save time, post consistently, and repurpose your ideas seamlessly across platforms.” And isn’t that what we all want? An easy, consistent way to promote ourselves and our business?
Batching content is when you sit down and create all the content you need for the next two weeks, two months, or however long you want to plan ahead. Instead of creating a powerful and educational Instagram caption every day, you sit down and create them all at once. One caption may take you 20 minutes to write, but once you’re in the groove, creating five captions may only take you 30 minutes.
Personally, I know if I don’t plan out my content in advance then I won’t post! By batching content for social media in advance, I am able to stay on top of 2022 content trends and post on a schedule.
How to Batch Create Content
I know what you’re thinking: Mikayla, batching content sounds great, but how exactly do I go about accomplishing that?
No worries! I have three tips for how to easily batch create content and save yourself the stress of waking up in the morning and realizing you have nothing new to post.
Tip #1: Create content buckets for your posts.
A content bucket is a general category for your blog/social content. For me, my content buckets are tips related to web design, copywriting, entrepreneurship, motherhood, and wellness. Pick five content buckets for your niche! Planoly suggests creating content buckets that center around your brand goals. Content buckets for a therapist might be nutrition, workouts, lifestyle/day in the life (so you can share how you take care of yourself), mental health, and client transformations. Don’t get stuck here – consider this a basic brainstorming session. Who is your ideal client? What are you offering with your business? How can you show your clients that you are an authority?
Tip #2: Brainstorm and research your posts.
When you were in school, you didn’t just sit down and start writing your five-page term paper, did you? (Or maybe you did… and that’s okay, too!) I always think that having a strong outline helps when tackling a project. This is where brainstorming and research can really benefit you. Spend a chunk of time brainstorming ideas within your content buckets. Do a little market research – check out other creators in your niche for inspiration. Do they have a cool feature that repeats every week? Do you like how someone uses a lot of memes to describe audience pain points? If you’re really stuck in this phase, try this 30-minute content marketing brainstorming process from the CoSchedule blog. (My favorite part of their process is to focus on the quantity of ideas at first more than quality. Just write your ideas down and worry about making them better later!)
Tip #3 : Analyze your own content.
Make sure you check out your own post insights to see which posts are resonating with your audience. It’s not all about likes – look at your saves and shares! Create more posts similar to the current top performers on your feed. If you’re getting hundreds of likes on an educational post, you definitely want to make sure to include those in your plan for when you are content batching. Blog posts that resonate could have a high number of comments, a large number of link clicks, or even a large number of pins on Pinterest. There are many ways to look at what you have already created in order to make batching content easier. For example, I had an Instagram post back in May of 2021 that performed really well with my audience, so I repurposed it for a post 10 months later. I changed the graphics and reworded the copy, and voila! I had a new post (that also got a lot of engagement)!
Now, it’s time to take all that research and get to work!
Batching Content for Instagram and Social Media
The most common form of content batching is for social media. My last two tips are centered around how to batch content for Instagram and social media. These two tips will make your life as a business owner so much easier!
Tip #4: Simplify your process for making reels.
Reels are incredibly popular right now. One good reel can get you a lot of new followers, so it’s important to make them consistently. The only problem is that making one reel can take a lot of time. My biggest suggestion is to get dressed up and record several reels at once! Make sure you are feeling confident, so you look confident when recording. (Do your hair, choose a great outfit, spend five minutes doing your makeup – whatever it is that makes you feel good, definitely invest the time to do that! It will absolutely pay off!) Next, research trending audio and start recording to audios that speak to you and your brand. (Just because an audio clip is trending, doesn’t mean you have to use it – make sure it aligns with the rest of your content batching.) In 30 minutes you can record 10+ reels! (Just don’t get too caught up on perfectly lip-syncing your audio!)
Tip #5: Work on one thing at a time!
This tip seems basic, but it’s actually super important. When you are trying to work on everything at once, nothing ends up getting done. Carve out time in your day to get a lot of ONE thing done. Need captions for social media? Write them all out, and then go back and figure out the images/graphics! Trying to figure out which hashtags to use? Upload all of your posts to your social media planner, and spend an hour adding hashtags and scheduling all of your posts. (If you’re stuck on hashtags, check out this article from Digital Agency Network with eleven different websites for finding hashtags. Personally, I like to work on graphics in Canva before writing out all my captions. Something about the creativity of Canva just inspires me! I’ll spend 1-2 hours designing a bunch of graphics, and go back later to write captions for them all in Planoly!
Content Batching 101
Now that we’ve gone over these five tips for batching content, I hope you will spend some time implementing them in your business! And if creating batch content for your blog or website sounds like something you would like to take off your plate, let’s chat! I offer SEO copywriting services for purpose-driven entrepreneurs and I would love to connect and talk about how I can help you more effectively present your business to potential clients. Happy creating!